IESG Response to the claim of Continued Abuse of Process by IPR-WG Chair Introduction On Wednesday, December 26, 2007, Dean Anderson issued an appeal claiming continued abuse of process by the IETF IPR WG Chair, Harald Alvestrand. The appeal is terse to the point of making it difficult to understand. The IESG believes that the appeal covers the following points. 1. The IPR WG Chair has declared one side of a debate off-topic within the IPR WG. The appeal cites messages addressed to Todd Glassey and Simon Josefsson from Harald. 2. The IPR WG Chair suspended Todd Glassey for asserting reasonable arguments contrary to the viewpoints of the IPR WG Chair and Brian Carpenter. 3. The IPR WG Chair suspended Dean Anderson for asserting reasonable arguments contrary to the viewpoints of the IPR WG chair and Brian Carpenter. 4. That the two suspensions are contrary to the law governing corporations, since a vote of the membership to suspend or expel members was not taken. 5. The listed actions by the IPR WG Chair represent a pattern of harassment and intimidation. Dean also proposes a remedy. Dean suggests the removal of Harald as IPR WG Chair. Each of these points in addressed in turn. Declaring one side of a debate off topic -- Todd Glassey When the IPR WG was formed, it was an appropriate place to discuss the transfer of rights to the IETF. This topic was discussed at length, and it is listed in the IPR WG Issue Tracker as issue #1197. The issue was raised by Todd Glassey in February 2006, received advice from counsel in March 2006, and was closed in April 2006 after an IPR WG Last Call. It is clear that the IPR WG considered Todd's alternate model for the transfer of rights to the IETF, and that after sufficient discussion, Todd's proposal was rejected. This decision is reflected in the current IPR WG documents. Despite this history, Todd's postings to the IPR WG mail list indicate that he has not accepted the idea that rights are not transferred to the IETF; rather, Todd's postings indicate that it ought to be self-evident that rights are indeed transferred to the IETF. Todd has expressed this view in multiple ways in many messages. The IESG supports the IPR WG Chair in his decision that this issue has been adequately discussed and declaring further discussion to be counterproductive and off-topic. Declaring one side of a debate off topic -- Simon Josefsson On the IPR WG mail list, Simon Josefsson has been strongly advocating that the IETF should grant licenses in its documents. Simon wants the text and code in IETF document to be easily incorporated in works released under open-source licenses, including the GPL. Simon gained a lot of support for his position regarding code, but there was an equal and opposite concern. Unless code can be shown to be free of restrictions in license, such as the GPL "copyleft" requirement, implementers who were not willing to use copylefted code would be unable to use the code given as examples in IETF documents. The issue was debated on the IPR WG mail list for a long time, and many issues were revisited during the discussion. Eventually a compromise emerged. Under the compromise, text and code are treated differently. The document text can be copied, extracted, and translated, but it cannot be modified. The code contained in documents can be copied, modified, and used without restriction. To offer this capability, code included in IETF documents must be unencumbered. As a result, the doctrine of "no additional copyright statements" was upheld by the IPR WG, and the language was clarified to state that the submitter must ensure that they are able to warrant that no restrictions exist on them being able to make the grant of rights involved. The IPR WG documents that contain this compromise went to IPR WG Last Call, and no issue was raised against this compromise position. However, Simon resumed his argument that the IETF should allow GPLed code to be included in IETF documents, which would violate the compromise. The IESG supports the IPR WG Chair in his decision that this issue has been adequately discussed and declaring further discussion to be counterproductive and off-topic. Suspension of Todd Glassey from IPR WG mail list The suspension of Todd Glassey from the IPR WG mail list is the subject of another appeal to the IESG. That appeal will be handled separately. Suspension of Dean Anderson from IPR WG mail list Dean Anderson posted messages to the IPR WG mail list containing extreme accusations on matters that are not enlightening for the IPR WG's active topics. Following these messages, Harald suspended Dean's posting rights. The suspension message included these words: > I have noted that a few messages sent by Dean Anderson <dean@av8.com> > to this list were not in a tone expected for conversation on IETF lists. > > Dean Anderson is also the subject of an in-power PR-Action: > < http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf-announce/current/msg01967.html> > > Under the procedures of RFC 3683, I have suspended his posting > privilleges to the IPR-WG mailing list. As indicated in the message from Harald, Dean is the subject of an in-force PR-Action for the IETF mail list. This action was taken by the IESG, following the procedure in RFC 3683, which also states in Section 2: If approved by the IESG, then: o those identified on the PR-action have their posting rights to that IETF mailing list removed; and, o maintainers of any IETF mailing list may, at their discretion, also remove posting rights to that IETF mailing list. RFC 3683 imposes no preconditions for removing the posting rights. Nevertheless, this action was taken only after Dean posted inappropriate messages to the IPR WG mail list. The IESG believes that the IPR WG Chair acted properly. Dean was making personal attacks, making convoluted legal arguments, and threatening legal action. The PR-action was instituted to stop these derogatory messages. Contrary to the law governing corporations Dean's assertion is based on a theory that the IETF is a membership corporation. Of course, the IETF is not a membership corporation, so no such vote is possible. The IETF has no members. Pattern of harassment and intimidation The IESG finds the actions of the IPR WG Chair, Harald Alvestrand, to be consistent with IETF policies and procedures. All of the listed actions were very public. The IESG finds no harassment or intimidation. Conclusion For the reasons provided above, the appeal is denied. _______________________________________________ IETF-Announce@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-announce
